


that which fate binds together

by Whitherward



Series: that which fate binds together [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: El & Will are soulmates fight me, F/M, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, background mileven, cameos from other characters but El & Will centric, just a pair of sweet screwed up kids, some things you can't just get over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 14:15:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15974024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whitherward/pseuds/Whitherward
Summary: Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.





	that which fate binds together

**Author's Note:**

> In the course of writing another ST fic, I was struggling to find Will as a character and branched off into some little tangents. This is the result.
> 
> Summary quote is Emily Brontë.
> 
> A scene in this story was heavily inspired by a scene in 'Perfectly At Home' by Juxtaposie, and is used here with kind permission.

-

 

The Upside Down is inside Will. El knows none of the others can detect it, but she can. She can feel it, taste it. It lives under his skin, curls off him like smoke.

In the aftermath, when she was safe and laying on a bed in the Byers house, she’d been half propped up against Mike on one side with Hopper on the other in a chair by the bed and her head had been splitting, everything swimming around her.

She’d been vaguely aware of Will in the doorway, being held up by Joyce and Jonathan, and there had been something dark and familiar shimmering in the air around him.

For this reason, she’d turned her face into Mike’s neck and pretended to sleep.

In the bright daylight, she considers Will more carefully.

He is the only thing that has ever been real in the void. In that pitch dark, where every other thing is a mirage, she could touch him. She remembers how he felt, cold and clammy, death lingering over him. But he was flesh and blood and solid matter.

He is the same now. In the days and weeks after the Mind Flayer, they recover together. After that first night, El thinks she should be uneasy around him but she isn’t. They don’t talk much – she doesn’t have the words and he doesn’t seem to have the inclination – but what they don’t say speaks volumes of its own.

There is still a dark shimmer around him, the very faintest aura. She can smell it, like ozone after a thunderstorm. She wonders if he knows a piece of the Upside Down is lodged in his soul like a splinter of glass. She’s not afraid, she has a piece of that dark in her too, in that part of her own soul that was cracked open enough to let her pull apart the fabric of the universe and stitch it back together again.

She thinks he knows, and if he can’t feel it in himself she thinks he feels it in her. It sits between them in their comfortable silence. Like calling to like.

\--

He finds it soothing to be around her. He loves his mom, his brother, his friends with everything he has. He knows they love him, and would die for him, and almost _have_ died for him on several occasions.

But they can’t every truly understand what he’s been through or what he’s seen and heard and felt. They want to but they don’t have the context, and he can’t articulate his experiences well enough to give it to them. And it’s tiring and hurtful for everyone, even though no one says it.

He doesn’t need to explain anything to El because she knows. She has seen and heard and felt.

He remembers her in those dark days. He had been so alone in that place. He’d tried to reach his mother so many times but she was always just that bit too far away, on the other side, unreachable. He’d been so lost, so cold, so afraid. The only things in there with him were monsters. And then El had been there, a brief blazing presence, holding his hand – the only warm thing he’d felt in days – calling his name, feeding him some of her strength.

She’d been there with him in the dark.

And he doesn’t need to say any of this to her. She will just look at him with those huge dark eyes and smile and _know_ and somehow he’ll feel a little less broken than he did before.

He wonders how this happened, how this person - whose entrance into the Party’s lives he had been either missing or unconscious or possessed for, who his only memory of was her fleeting warmth in the darkness and the whisper of his name - felt so familiar. How he knew in his bones, immediately and without question, that his entire existence was and always would be inextricably entwined with hers.

\--

If any of the others find El and Will’s instant closeness peculiar, nobody really says anything about it. They have all had to adjust to far weirder realities so it just becomes another accepted fact of their universe, as if it has always been this way.

Mike is a little wary, that first time he walks into the cabin during their recovery period and they are on the couch under a blanket, Will drawing while El watches with her head on his shoulder. Mike loves Will like a brother but he has a deep and irrational jealous streak where El is concerned, which has only been made worse by the intervening year, and the sight of them stops him cold.

There is an odd, tense moment. El doesn’t understand the heaviness that is suddenly in the air, although she can feel and observe it, in the way Will seems to shrink a little, in the clench of Mike’s jaw and the way his eyebrows draw together.

She doesn’t have the words to make this situation go away so she deals with it in her usual manner, which is simply to do what she feels like doing. She rises from the couch, crosses the room and wraps herself around Mike, revelling in the solid warm _realness_ of him. His arms come up automatically to clutch her to his chest, and she feels the tension bleed out of him. And just like that the heavy atmosphere lifts, and El hums in contentment as Mike’s thumb rubs small circles into the back of her neck.

She won’t understand what this moment was really about until much later. When the memory occurs to her unbidden along with the realisation, she’ll slap Mike lightly on the arm and cackle, and he’ll grin sheepishly and half shrug one shoulder knowing he has no defence. She’ll tease him about it every so often for the rest of their lives.

But for now she turns back to the couch, pulling Mike along by the hand. Will has relaxed and scoots to make space, and they all cram together with El in the middle.

El feels so happy in this moment, in the safety of the cabin, with the patter of the rain outside and the warmth of the blanket and her boys.

\--

It takes Will a little while to see his way to the real El.

She has no artifice to her personality, which is one of his favourite things about her, but he has come to the gradual understanding that his view of her is clouded. First, by the others descriptions of her incredible abilities, and later by his own first-hand experience of them. Of her courage and her strength, and of being saved by her. He realises he thinks of her as something like a superhero.

And she is. She is all of these things and more, but she is also vulnerable in the way no one else he knows is. He realises, slowly, bit by bit, that she is afraid of things when he thought she could never be afraid of anything. She is not afraid of otherworldly monsters but she can be skittish about being touched if she is not the one to initiate the contact. She doesn’t like the dark, small spaces cause her to panic and she will flinch at sudden movements or loud noises.

He learns that he is not the only one who has nightmares.

El spends the night at the Byers’ when Hopper will be working late. On one stormy night, they are asleep in his room – El in his bed, Will in a sleeping bag on the floor – when she begins to toss and turn. Will is awake a moment before she begins to whimper, pulled from his own dreams by an unknown instinct, and he whispers to her in the dark as she begins to thrash. In an effort to wake her, he grips her arm.

This turns out to be the exact wrong thing to do.

El screams, his bedroom window shatters and he finds himself hurled back by an invisible force, colliding with the wall several feet behind.

As he struggles to catch his breath, winded, she is on her knees beside him sobbing. Brokenly, she apologises over and over. She reaches out to him but her hand stops an inch from his, hovering. He closes the gap himself and laces their fingers tightly together and she collapses into him.

In the very short time it takes his mom and Jonathan to burst into the room in a panic, Will and El are huddled together on the floor, clutching each other as she cries and his heart breaks.

\--

Spring is like a miracle for El. She’s never seen it before – her whole life has been sterile white walls and last year she hadn’t been allowed to leave the cabin – and she feels like she is coming to life along with everything else.

She’s still lying low, but Hop is letting her out sometimes, as long as she stays in sight of the cabin or the Byers’ house and someone is with her. The whole Party is around a lot, loud and boisterous and revelling in just being together with all six of them. They explore the woods within the limited distance they are allowed to go, and sometimes Mike pulls her along by the hand and she gets a funny feeling at the feel of his fingers wrapped round hers. ( _Butterflies_ , Max whispers to her as they trail behind the boys, bumping shoulders as they walk along).

But a lot of her time outside is spent with just Will.

Hop and Joyce spend a lot of time together now, sitting on the porch of the cabin drinking coffee and smoking, and Joyce usually brings Will. Will brings his art supplies and El is fascinated. She has watched him draw before, pencil drawings from his imagination, but now he gets out paint and chalks and puts the world around them down on paper.

He spreads out with her on the ground and shows her what to do and tells her to just have fun. She doesn’t have his talent – he assures her everything she does is great even though it looks nothing like what he is producing – but she likes the colors and she _does_ have fun.

It’s during this time together that they start to talk more. It’s easier to find the words and let them flow when her hands and brain are focussed on doing something else. He’s a good person to talk to, he listens and asks questions, and he has learned to interpret her silence and distinguish between when she is forming a sentence in her head and when she doesn’t want to answer. She never feels under pressure to tell him things.

He tells her things as well. She learns his favorite food (mint choc chip ice cream), his favorite book (The Hobbit) and his favorite color (all of them). He tells her, haltingly and over several weeks, about his dad and why he doesn’t live with them anymore.

Will is easy to be with and easy to talk to. She discovers that he is keenly observant and sharply, unexpectedly funny. He is quiet by nature, as she is, and creative and smart. She finds that beyond their bond, beyond that soul-deep connection she feels to him, she likes him very much.

\--

El isn’t stupid. Will learns pretty fast that she does not appreciate being slowed down for or spoken to like she’s a little kid.

She can read and write, although her ability in both is several years below where it should be. Her vocabulary is limited – in the lab they taught her only what they needed her to know – and her syntax is a little off. Her speech can sound stilted and strange after a lifetime of speaking only when spoken to, followed by a year of speaking only to a gruff police chief in an isolated cabin, but she’s getting better every day. Now that she’s allowed to be with her friends, repeated exposure to their fast paced conversation is rubbing off on her.

The real challenge is in her understanding of the world. Before she escaped, she’d had no education or exposure to science or history or culture. She has limited knowledge of social convention and a lifetime of context and unspoken rules to catch up on.

But she’s not stupid.

The others don’t speak to her like she’s dumb and they don’t slow down for her, but they continually interrupt themselves to explain what they are talking about, or they’ll explain things to her without prompting, and Will realises she doesn’t like it, it makes her feel like an outsider. He realises at the same time that Mike has clued into this before him, maybe from the beginning, and that generally Mike will only explain something in response to a direct request from El to have something explained.

He also realises that Mike hasn’t said anything to the others about it, most likely because El has asked him not to – because one thing Mike is not is shy about making his feelings known if he thinks that someone is upsetting El – because that’s how she is. El is intuitive, and she’s good at knowing how other people are feeling. Mike wasn’t wrong when he’d told Will that El would have understood – she understands a lot. Like the fact that her friends love her and they don’t want her to feel left out.

El is not stupid.

She knows things most kids her age don’t. She knows things most adults don’t. She knows about fear and cruelty and death. She knows the world is scary and life is not fair. She has a deep and instinctual knowledge of dark and otherworldly things.

Knowing these things won’t help her when it is time to go to school though.

So Hop gets her a tutor. Will has no idea what story this woman has been told but she is brought to his house, which has been deemed more appropriate than the cabin – and she works with El during the day, five days a week. When Will gets home from school, he sits at the kitchen table with El and they do their homework together.

As spring moves into summer, the others get off school but El keeps working. She won’t be ready to join them in the fall, and Will knows this is devastating to her, so the aim is to be ready to go to high school with them.

She’s doing well, she soaks up everything like a sponge and it makes Will feel fiercely proud, but reading is still a problem for her. Not reading to herself – she is a voracious reader and the Party keeps her well supplied with new books to devour – reading out loud. She stumbles over the words and gets frustrated, and the more frustrated she gets the more she struggles, until she loses her temper and tosses the book aside.

This is a problem because she will be required to read out loud in school. And she’ll be enough of a target already – new girl in a small town, not to mention she’ll be hanging out with the nerds – without dissolving into a stuttering, tearful mess in the middle of English class.

If Will can spare her this one difficulty, he will. This is something he can do.

El loves to be read aloud to and Will knows that Mike does frequently, especially at first when they were working on her comprehension because she could follow the words along, but moreso now simply because she likes it. Will has even read to her before, to calm her after a nightmare or panic attack. But every effort of her own to read aloud ends in tears, literally.

So the look on her face the next time she stays over and Will informs her that she’s going to read him a bedtime story is something to behold.

She puts up a fight but Will is patient, and firm, and he lays his reasons out calmly and logically because that is what she responds to. And eventually he lies back in his sleeping bag as she begins to read to him haltingly, stumbling.

They carry on like this through the summer. Not just when she stays over, but other quiet moments when it is only the two of them. He finds she is most comfortable reading to him when there is no one else around and when he is not looking at her, so he makes himself comfortable on his bed or hers and closes his eyes, and eventually the sound of her voice begins to lull him to sleep.

Will doesn’t sleep well, generally. His nightmares are quieter than El’s. He avoids going to sleep until exhaustion pulls him under. He sleeps, fitful, until he jolts awake silently and lays in the dark in rigid, unmoving terror until dawn starts to creep under the curtains.

He gets the best naps of his life during their reading sessions, slipping under quickly and sleeping deeply and peacefully. With El he is safe, and he frequently wakes an hour or more later to the sound of her still reading. The calm he feels in her presence starts to bleed through into the rest of his life, and his nightmares become less frequent.

It seems that El, in her quiet way of understanding, has picked up on this. Their sessions continue long after she has become confident reading aloud.

He goes through an especially tough period at the end of August and doesn’t sleep for days. When El is dropped off she takes one look at him and leads him by the hand outside. He sleeps the whole afternoon laying in the grass in the late summer sunshine, his head in her lap as she reads aloud from Black Beauty and cards her fingers through his hair.

When he wakes, she leans down and kisses his forehead. In this moment he is so stunningly, blindingly grateful for her he begins to cry.

\--

School is a pretty grim experience for El at first. She starts at Hawkins High with the rest of the Party on the first day of freshman year, and she hates everything about it. The overwhelming crush of people makes her want to vomit or hide or both.

Her friends fold in around her. Her timetable has been arranged so she is always with one of them in class (benefits of having the Chief of Police for a father). Mike walks her between classes, her hand clasped firmly in his, which draws more than a few curious stares from their classmates. Max is with her during that first awful PE session, leaning on a field hockey stick and cracking jokes to distract her from her tragic lack of hand-eye coordination (El accidentally smacks Ashley Cummings in the shin during the first five minutes, effectively ending her chances of being in with the cool kids, not that she cares).

As she adjusts to the massive culture shock, she begins to notice the whispers that follow Will around the school.

Hawkins is a small town and Will’s disappearance is the most sensational thing to happen here, _ever._ Nobody is forgetting in a hurry, and they won’t let him forget either. Will shrugs it off with a lopsided grin and tells her he’s used to it, but it makes her blood boil.

She throws poisonous glares at anyone who calls him ‘Zombie Boy’ within her hearing, and she may have discreetly tripped Zack Brown when he shouldered past Will in the hall and called him a freak. If Zack hadn’t been able to get his hands out in time and had knocked out five teeth smashing his face into the floor, that’s not her problem.

It all comes to a head when she gets into what is essentially a brawl with half her class in the girls locker room after Ashley, who still has it in for her after the hockey thing, calls Will a stray dog and tells El she’ll get fleas if she keeps hanging around him. El has learned enough self-control not to use her powers in public but she’s not above throwing a punch, and Max wades in because that’s what friends do, and the pair of them end up sitting in the Principal’s office while Hopper tries very hard to look like he cares that some teenage mean girl got her hair ripped out at the scalp for calling Will Byers white trash.

In the end it takes Will sitting her down for a talk to rein her in. It’s early, they get dropped off together by Joyce and they’re sitting on a low wall outside the school waiting for the others to arrive. There is a bite in the air, first of the fall chill, and El has the bottom half of her face buried in her jacket as she sullenly listens to Will.

He tells her he really doesn’t care what people say about him, because why would he when he has such great friends, and everyone else doesn’t know shit about him anyway. He doesn’t care and he especially doesn’t want her getting in fights over it. He tells her this with a pointed look at her still-fading black eye.

She believes him because friends don’t lie and even if they did she believes Will to be physically incapable of lying to her, but she still grumbles and scuffs her heels at the wall a little, burrowing further into her jacket.

Will just grins and bumps her shoulder fondly with his.

\--

He can feel when she is near, sense her presence half a second before she enters a room. A warm prickle on the back of his neck and down his spine. When the phone rings, he knows it’s her calling before he picks up.

He doesn’t question this too closely, that his consciousness seems tied to hers. It feels like she has always been a part of him and he was just waiting to find her, or for her to find him as she did. They are like two trees that have grown independently, but in some deep unseen place their roots are tangled together. So much so that they could never be separated – to remove one would be to kill the other.

As they get older that prickling feeling solidifies into a constant weight in the back of his mind. He feels her presence always, very faintly. It’s not something he is consciously aware of most of the time.

One night in the depth of winter, he sits bolt upright in bed. Gripped by a profound and terrifying dread he knows instinctively has nothing to do with nightmares, he wakes the whole house shouting that they need to get to the Hoppers right now, _right now_.

His mom doesn’t question him – he is so thankful for that – and they drive through the snow to the house on the edge of town that Hop bought when El started school. Banging on the door and yelling, they wake Hopper up. As soon as he opens the door, Will barges past and takes the stairs two at a time, running for El’s room.

She’s not there.

He comes back down and they search the house. The back door is standing wide open but snowfall has masked any tracks. Hopper is panicking but trying not to show it, being ushered into a coat by Joyce, who is systematically arming them with flashlights and extra scarves.

Will stares blankly out at the night, dread in the pit of his stomach. The barrier between worlds has been stretched thin in Hawkins recently, they have both felt it. Felt something trying to push through. He wonders what she has met out there, simultaneously worried sick and angry at her for going alone.

For the first time Will tries to reach out for her, tugging at the thread of their connection, searching for that part of her which has always called to him. He finds her – her presence is warm and familiar, alive and pulsing like a heartbeat. He launches out of the house at a dead sprint, Hop and his mom following behind.

They find her slumped in the snow, half frozen to death, blood streaming from her nostrils and ears. There is terrible destruction around her, the frozen earth is churned and scarred, but all is quiet. As Hop gathers her in his arms, Will stands still with his eyes closed, breathing, reaching.

He feels nothing. Whatever hole was punched through, she has stitched it back up again. He just hopes the cost to her is not too dear.

It takes her three days to wake up.

Will spends the whole time at her bedside. Mike rages a storm, blames himself and anyone else he can think of, and puts his fist through the living room wall in lieu of putting it through somebody’s face. He spends the first day pacing her room like a caged animal, until Will’s stoic presence brings him down out of his temper, and then he sits slumped on the other side of her bed holding her hand to his lips, head bowed as if in prayer.

The rest of the Party drifts in and out. They have made the Hopper house their temporary home as they keep their vigil. Hop spends his time hovering in El’s room or locked away with Joyce, and he has such an aura of despair around him that he drags everyone else down.

But Will is not afraid. He can feel her as he did that night, her presence is a warm steady thrum and it’s getting stronger. She’s coming back to him, to all of them. She’s just gathering her strength. He tells Hop this, and gets a strange look in return.

On the third day when she opens her eyes and smiles at them serenely, he thinks this is the happiest he’s ever been.

As it turns out he’s not the only one who is angry with her for going alone, but she insists there was no time and none of them really have the heart to stay mad at her when she’s here with them, so gloriously alive when they came so close to losing her.

It takes a little while to get back to normal, or their version of normal, but they do get there.

\--

El loves to dance - to any kind of music, really. She always has too much energy, and she likes to move and she likes to laugh, and she'll dance to anything with anyone.

Mike is her preferred partner, of course, and he'll allow her to lead him out onto the dancefloor for slow songs, where he can be almost stationary with his arms around her. This is within his comfort zone. He's not one for the fast songs though, so she dances these with Will.

Will's not really one for dancing to fast songs either, or dancing in general, and he doesn't particularly care for the kind of music they play at school dances but he's a good sport and he indulges her.

It also helps that Will never really cares what anyone else thinks. His experience with the Mind Flayer - losing Bob, almost losing _himself_ \- left him with a slightly devil-may-care attitude and a firm belief that life is too short to sweat the small stuff, and it shows in everything he does.

She knows what people say about them, about her in particular. An odd, quiet girl who showed up in town out of nowhere. Who is the adopted daughter of the Police Chief but gets into fights. Who has nerdy Mike Wheeler eating out of the palm of her hand but who also walks the school halls arm in arm with weirdo Will Byers.

She has learned that high school kids are mean, and public displays of affection are not the norm among their age range unless you’re dating someone, so her classmates stare and whisper behind their hands when Will twirls her repeatedly under his arm and does silly dance moves with her and laughs. They call her names when she throws her arms around him and kisses his cheek, and in the next moment is swaying to something slow with her head resting over Mike's heart.

She understands what it looks like to outsiders, but Mike and Will represent totally different things to her.

What she feels for Mike is big and a little scary, like standing at the edge of a precipice she’s not quite ready to jump off. It’s nothing like what she feels for Will.

What she feels for Will is small and safe. A tiny spark in her heart, an ember glowing warm and steady. Where Mike consumes – in the best way – Will nourishes.  Her missing piece.

She knows what they say but if Will doesn't care neither does she. Because he’s right - life is too short. For so many things, but especially too short not to dance with her best friend.

\--

There is a terrible, confusing time in his late teens when Will wonders if he is in love with El. All he knows at this time is that he _loves_ her with his whole heart, she is his best friend and the person he feels most comfortable with in the world. And every book and movie and tv show he has ever encountered in his entire life tells him that this means she must be “the one”.

But he has watched Mike open himself and lay his entire being at her feet. And he has watched El gather up that gift and cherish it. He sees the way Mike looks at her – first with something akin to awe, and a few years later with dark, hungry eyes. He can feel along with everyone else how the air between them is charged and heavy, how they spark off each other, and wonders if there is something wrong with him.

Because the thing is, Will doesn’t _want_ El. He thinks she is beautiful but he’s not attracted to her. He has kissed her before - on the forehead, on the cheek, even chastely on the lips once during a particularly fraught night of panic attacks - but it doesn’t make him feel anything.  He loves her, and he likes being with her, but he doesn’t want to _be with her_.

And he thinks there must be something wrong, defective, with him. Because he has never wanted anyone that way. And how will he ever if he can’t even want his beautiful best friend?

Will tears himself up about this, because Mike is also his best friend.  Mike who came up to him that day in the playground, who has been with him through thick and thin, who was there for him when he thought he was going crazy and every day before and since, and here he is essentially _willing_ himself to have a crush on Mike’s girl.

 He feels so wrong. He wonders if this is a result of his experiences, if the Mind Flayer took some essential piece of him when it fled and he’ll never get it back, never be normal.

If El is aware of any of this as he is working his way through it (and she must be because she seems to know every thought in his head and feeling in his heart before he speaks it and he couldn’t be any more obviously twisted up over something to do with her because he can’t even look her in the eye anymore because _friends don’t lie_ and _fuck fuck fuck_ ) she doesn’t ever say anything about it, and never treats him any differently.

And if Mike is aware of it (and if El is then Mike is, Will reasons, because El still has no real filter and it is a truth universally acknowledged that if El knows something, Mike will shortly know it also) then he does a damn good job of hiding it.

It simultaneously makes Will feel grateful and even more wretched.

He tortures himself over this for two months but early in the first semester of their Senior Year, Will is walking past the football field on his way home and spots Luke Jackson changing his jersey and his breath catches in his throat and oh. _Oh_.

It both fixes his problem and creates a whole new one, but he is able to look El in the eye again and breathe easy around Mike without feelings of guilt eating him alive and for that he is so thankful he could weep.

But it’s a rough couple of months.

\--

Joyce and Hopper finally get their shit together. It has taken years, through hardship and bloodshed and mutual raising of a gaggle of kids not all their own, but they get there. The Byers family moves in with the Hoppers, in their house on the edge of town.

Nobody is more delighted by this than El.

She loves Hopper dearly, she does, but sometimes a teenage girl needs a feminine perspective. Joyce has been the primary mother figure in El’s life since she met her, and Hopper is nuts about her even if he has his own way of showing it, and having her live with them just feels _right_. Not to mention that with Joyce comes Will.

El and Will have always felt most secure together and in the following months they become even closer and more content. El is buoyed by the knowledge that Will is only in the next room, rather than across town, and Will seems more relaxed now that they sleep under the same roof.

Their relationship with the outside world changes slightly. Will starts to refer to El as his sister in casual conversation and El, always so hungry for familial connection, is absolutely over the moon with this development.

They don’t act any differently than they always have. They still walk the school halls together – her arm around his waist and his slung over her shoulders – heads bowed together in laughter and half whispered conversation. They still dance it out at every single school event while her boyfriend is content to watch from the sidelines. They still lie together on the grass, shoulders touching, watching the clouds and talking about everything or nothing.

But the whispers stop following them. The collective consciousness of Hawkins seems to reset itself now that they are a nice little family unit, as if it hasn’t known at least half of them for their whole lives.

The ugly rumours about them at school peter out. Their classmates seem to forget that they aren’t actually brother and sister. It helps that they look quite alike, with their chestnut hair and large dark eyes, and how preternaturally in sync they are. They finish each other’s sentences, they’ll turn their heads to look at something in perfect unison, and one always seems to know where the other is.

People get their names mixed up. By the end of high school they are Will and El Byers, El and Will Hopper. When corrected, people blink and laugh and shake their heads for forgetting they are not related.

It’s ridiculous and perfect and kind of messy.

But that’s life.

\--

Two weeks before Halloween, El gets the flu.

Her immune system has always been weaker than the rest of them. Raised in such a sterile environment, she was never exposed to the myriad bugs and infections that children normally are, and she spent much of her first two years of freedom in a semi-permanent state of illness with some sniffle or other.

At first, everyone assumes this is business as usual. El is lightly teased by the rest of the Party about being ill over Halloween _again_ and she takes it with relatively good humor, rolling her eyes and only grumbling a little.

But as the days pass she gets sicker and sicker. She develops a wet, rattling cough and a fever that climbs and refuses to break.

El’s bumps and scrapes and illnesses are traditionally dealt with at home. It’s not an ideal or a long term solution but her horror of all things even vaguely medical in context make even trips to the school nurse an ordeal, and Hawkins is a small enough town to have a doctor who still makes house calls, so they get by. 

This time though, it’s not enough. They call for the doctor in the middle of the night after a coughing fit leaves El heaving for breath. The doctor arrives, listens to her chest and announces there’s nothing he can do to help – she has rattles in her lungs and she needs antibiotics and IV fluids. They have no choice but to take her to the hospital.

It’s awful.

Hopper carries El to the car and sits in the back with her cradled in his lap. Will sits up front feeling sick, while his mom drives. El cries the whole way, and the sound of her quietly sobbing between coughing fits makes tears prick at the corners of Will’s eyes.

Things get worse when she is laying on a gurney being examined and it becomes clear that in her fever she’s not entirely sure where she is. Hop turns white when she calls him ‘Papa’ and Will knows he’ll remember the terrible expression on his face for a long time.

In an effort to stop things from escalating – she is babbling now, and the lights have begun to flicker ominously – Will takes her face in his hands and presses their foreheads together. She tenses, and he dimly hears the electric hiss of some machine shorting out, but then he sees recognition in her eyes and her entire body goes limp.

He stays like that as the doctors attach monitors to her, insert an IV line. He keeps his eyes locked on hers and breathes slowly and evenly, willing her to match her breath to his, silently trying to impart some measure of calm to her.

In the end, the situation isn’t as dire as it seemed in the middle of the night. She has a nasty chest infection, but the doctors expect her to recover quickly with rest and antibiotics. They want to keep her in for a few days to be sure though, and so they come up with a plan.

Hopper throws his weight around a little and it is agreed that El can always have someone with her. Hop, Joyce, Will and Mike will take shifts and El will never for one second be left alone. They all pretend this is purely to do with her intense phobia of hospitals – that is the story they tell the doctors – none of them say out loud how terrified they are of what could happen if they leave her, of returning during visiting hours to find she has been stolen away.

It goes like this. Hop and Joyce take half the day each. Will comes after school and stays into the evening, and Mike stays with her through the night. El picks up quickly once the medicine starts to work, her fever breaks and she is calm in their presence.

On day three Will is asleep on the hospital bed, on top of the blanket while El is underneath. He hadn't meant to sleep, he is fully clothed still in his jacket and boots, arms folded over his chest. After taking over a shift from his mom, he'd sat on the edge of the bed and swung his legs up, stretching them out and crossing them at the ankle. She'd rolled into his side and pressed her nose to the side of his shoulder, and they'd talked like that for a while until El drifted off to sleep. Will hadn't been far behind her. He hasn't slept well while she's been in hospital, his own nightmares plagued by men in masks and white coats taking her away, and her proximity is soothing as ever.

He is woken by a hand on his shin and a gentle shake. He cracks one eye open expecting a nurse and sees Mike there instead. He feels a dull twinge of anxiety in his gut, mind wandering to a similar situation years ago, but there is no tension in the room and Mike's face is open and friendly as he holds a cup of coffee out.

Will opens both eyes, squinting out the window as he sits up. It's dark outside, he's slept for several hours and he feels like hell. He swings his legs over to sit on the edge of the bed and accepts the coffee, as Mike flops into a chair.  
  
Woken by Will sitting up, El makes a small sound and opens her eyes. A smile lights up her face as she sees Mike sitting by the bed. She reaches out for him and Mike takes her hand, thumb rubbing soothingly over her knuckles, and Will figures it's time to go. He places his hand on El's wrist, just above where Mike has a hold on her hand, and squeezes lightly ( _goodnight_ ).

El smiles up at him ( _sleep tight_ ) and for a moment the three of them sit there like that, quiet in each others company. Will is the first to move. Standing from the edge of the bed, he claps Mike once on the shoulder and walks out.

Throwing one last glance behind him, the last thing he sees is Mike slipping under the blanket, shoes kicked off, and folding El into his arms.

He feels sluggish and slightly unreal as he walks through the hospital and the white walls and smell of disinfectant are oppressive. It is a relief to walk out into the night and take a deep breath of fresh, cold air.

A short distance away a Hawkins Police car is idling at the curb, steam curling from the exhaust. He can see Steve behind the wheel, waiting to pick him up having dropped Mike off, and Will starts toward it, raising a hand in greeting when Steve looks up. If he feels slightly discomfited by the rustle of leaves on the ground and the gathering dark, he pushes it to the back of his mind.

\---

November is a cruel month for Will.

As the nights draw in, so does he. He retreats into his own head, becomes sullen and snappy. Often El is the only person whose company he will tolerate. She doesn’t try to talk to him or touch him, but usually will only be near him. In the same room or at the next table over in the library. Separately engaged but existing in the same space.

Will doesn’t sleep well in these black periods. He is restless and often wakes from nightmares, sweaty and disoriented. He is suffocated by the blankets and the walls pressing in on him and leaves the house in the small hours to stalk through the woods, walking until he’s so exhausted he can barely keep on his feet.

When he is on these pre-dawn excursions, El is woken in her bed by nothing in particular except a small instinct that brings her out into the night in her pyjamas and an old coat. She wanders the woods with no direction in mind until she is inevitably, inexorably brought into his orbit. She walks beside him or behind him, ten feet away, never speaking or trying to engage with him but merely following along like a shadow or a ghost as the cold seeps into both their bones.

El doesn’t like the cold, but nor is she particularly bothered by it – they have both been in colder places. Morning will find them curled together, heaped half on top of each other like puppies on a couch or bed under a pile of blankets, when he finally succumbs to cold and exhaustion. When his demons are quiet enough to let him rest, he will close the gap between them without speaking and allow her to take his hand and lead him home.

And this is always the way. No matter how far away he goes he will always come back to her, and she will always be there to take his hand. They go back, together, always.

 So during the darkest part of the night she is content to walk one hour into the next, hands in pockets and eyes on the ground, guided by the small tug in the back of her mind, like a tether connecting them even when she can’t see him, always close.

She is still with him in the dark. She always will be.

 

-


End file.
